John Lennon Statue on Mathew Street, Liverpool

The John Lennon statue in Liverpool stands on Mathew Street, on the pavement outside the Cavern Pub and opposite the Cavern Club. The bronze Lennon leans against the Cavern Wall of Fame. Sculptor David Webster made it, and it was unveiled on 16 January 1997, when the Cavern marked 40 years since it opened.

Which John Lennon statue in Liverpool?

Liverpool has more than one Lennon, and search results mix them up. One of the pages that ranks for "john lennon statue liverpool" is actually about the airport statue. If you're in the city centre near the Cavern, the one you want is on Mathew Street. The other two are elsewhere.

People searching "john lennon memorial liverpool" may mean the Peace Monument at Kings Dock, about 1.1 km from Mathew Street as the crow flies. The airport statue is a separate trip out to Speke.

Is there a John Lennon bridge in Liverpool?

We couldn't find one. A search of OpenStreetMap for "John Lennon Bridge" returns nothing, and nothing else in our research points to a bridge in Liverpool named after him. That's worth saying plainly, because "john lennon bridge liverpool" gets more searches than the statue itself.

The big thing in Liverpool that does carry his name is the airport. Speke Airport was renamed Liverpool John Lennon Airport in 2001, 21 years after he died. Its motto, "Above us only sky", is painted on the terminal roof. The airport also has Tom Murphy's statue (see the table) and, since 2005, a large steel Yellow Submarine. The submarine is about 15.6 m long and weighs around 18 tons. Roughly 80 apprentices at the Cammell Laird shipyard built it for the 1984 International Garden Festival, and it stood in Chavasse Park before it moved to the airport.

There is also a residential street called John Lennon Drive in Kensington (L6). If you were thinking of something else entirely, the map and the full memorials list cover Lennon tributes in other countries.

The Mathew Street statue up close

Webster based the figure on the cover photograph of Lennon's 1975 album Rock 'n' Roll. Lennon leans back against the wall, so one photo gets both him and the bricks behind him.

Those bricks are the Cavern Wall of Fame. Each carries the name of an act that played the original Cavern between 1957 and 1973. The wall and the statue were unveiled on the same occasion in January 1997, for the club's 40th anniversary, and Gerry Marsden unveiled the wall. The Cavern Club entrance is across the narrow street, about 70 m away going by map coordinates.

The head on the statue today isn't the one it was unveiled with. Vandals damaged the original, which had a duck-tail quiff, according to Liverpool Confidential. Webster had made seven spare heads showing Lennon at different ages, and one of them replaced it. So if older photos look slightly different, that's why.

Webster also made the Beatles figures on the front of the Hard Days Night Hotel, next to Mathew Street.

Not by Arthur Dooley

Some guides, a Flickr caption and even a Wikimedia Commons category credit the statue to Arthur Dooley. That's wrong. Wikipedia's list of Liverpool public art and Liverpool Confidential both name David Webster, and the list dates the work to 1996, which fits a statue made that year and unveiled the next January. Dooley did make a different piece on the same street, the wall sculpture Four Lads Who Shook the World, and that's probably where the mix-up started.

You may also see the statue's address given as 10 Mathew Street. No source we checked gives it a house number, so it's safer to look for the Cavern Pub and the Wall of Fame.

Beatles statues on and near Mathew Street

People searching "beatles statue mathew street" are often after something other than Lennon on his own. In November 2018 a bronze group of all four Beatles around a bench went in just inside the Rubber Soul complex on Mathew Street, commissioned by the owners, Pub Invest Group. You can sit on the bench with the band.

That bench group has a footnote. In December 2018 a Kazakh businessman linked to the fund behind the Beatles monument in Almaty said publicly that it copied the 2007 Almaty design. That was his claim; the Liverpool coverage presented the group as the owners' own commission and didn't mention Almaty.

The Beatles Statue at Pier Head, with all four band members, is a separate work about 600 m from Mathew Street.